


Morning Gorecast

by Ellislash (MintSharpie)



Category: Left 4 Dead 2
Genre: Apocalypse, Gen, Prequel, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 14:33:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6119448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MintSharpie/pseuds/Ellislash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rochelle's prelude - how did she end up left for dead in the first place?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morning Gorecast

"...already wondering how long it will take for Savannah to recover. This is Rochelle Pierre, channel 8 news." She gazed seriously into the camera while her tech counted three, then dropped her microphone.

"Okay, that's it. We need to go." Jake the Cameraman fumbled with the lens cap, still managing to stow his gear faster than she'd ever seen him do.

"Not yet. We've got two more shots to take.” She stripped her collared work blouse off from over her t-shirt and sighed gratefully for the small relief from the heat. “That piece can't just be me staring at the screen, or impersonal aerial views. We’ve got to make it visceral."

Jake's eyes bugged out at the suggestion. "Were you even listening to your own script? We shouldn't be out here at  _all_  without gas masks, and like  _hell_  I'm sticking around any longer!" He held out the camera bag. "You want the footage, then take the van. I'll tell the pilot to wait for you at the evac station on top of the hotel."

"Coward," Rochelle scolded as she took the heavy black case. "Go on back. I'll meet you later - with a promotion, after this story's finished." She was surprised to feel Jake grab her arm as she turned to go.

“Wait, Ro, are… You’re serious?”

To her amazement, Jake's pale, thin face showed real concern. She raised an eyebrow at him.

“When am I not?”

His amused snort was brief, immediately replaced by that intense worry again. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut for a moment, and when he opened them, they were wet.

"Then... Stay safe. Please." He drew her close and kissed her, oh so gently, mouth tasting of his morning caramel mocha. Before her lips could respond he pulled away, then hugged her fiercely.

"That's in case I never see you again," he whispered hoarsely, and fled to the helicopter's landing zone with the rest of the crew before Rochelle's brain could reboot itself.

She blinked, touching her lips with a finger as the chopper rose into the air. Jake was clearly overreacting, but Rochelle still made a mental note to follow up with this fascinating new development when she caught up to them.

Although journalists hadn't officially been ordered out yet – and she wouldn’t have left without a report even if that call _had_ been made – Rochelle did not linger. She wasted no time filming a nice pan across the road, clogged with abandoned cars, before gathering the gear up again. The other shot she wanted was at the hospital across town, so she tossed the lights and tripods into the back of the news van and slipped into the driver’s seat.

As soon as the engine revved, she knew she'd made a mistake – the street wasn't as empty as it had seemed a moment before. Growls, unrelated to her car's function, swelled in the heavy air. The bodies of those who'd been killed in the riots rose up from the ground. House doors opened and people - well, they  _looked_  like people, kinda - stumbled outside. All of them focused on Rochelle's car, and charged.

"Oh god. Oh no no no no no no..." She floored it, running over three "people" in the process. More woke up, following her progress down the street, chasing her van like some horribly twisted interpretation of the pied piper. Rochelle gave up on her shot of the hospital and frantically changed course for the evac station. Her hands were shaking so badly that she could hardly steer as her usual professional calm gave way to near-panic.

Not two blocks later she encountered another problem: several cars lay strewn across the road like they'd been tossed there by a cranky two-year-old. Her van was too big to get past, but not big enough to smash the obstacles away.

" _Son_ of a...!" She couldn't stop in time, and crashed headlong into the exposed undercarriage of a pickup truck. The airbag exploded in her face, nearly breaking her nose; and just to make matters worse, a car alarm started wailing. Rochelle cursed and threw open the door, grabbing her camera bag as she leaped to the ground.

She turned to run, but was jerked to a stop - a groaning, grotesque creature had seized the case she carried and was pulling her back. With a furious cry she tried to yank it out of the thing's hands, but it was horribly strong. Terrified and in despair, she let go. Thick black foam padding didn't keep the expensive equipment from crunching on the ground as she turned away and fled.

_This can't be real_ , a dazed and detached part of her moaned. Over and over:  _this can't be real!_  A hazy red shock lay over jagged, ice-crystalline panic, forcing her breakfast up her throat, but there was no time to be sick. If the horror movies were right, the car alarm would only distract them for so long; she had to get away, had to get to the hotel, had to get to Jake and the secret bottle of brandy she knew he kept in the chopper. The growing pursuit spurred her on, and she was chilled to the bone by the roaring synthesis of a hundred sounds no human voice was ever meant to make. 

Rochelle bared her teeth and kept running, dodging walking corpses as they woke around her, until she saw an olive-green HumVee upside-down in the road. There was a dead soldier - the lower half of one, anyway - lying nearby, and under the foul maroon lake of dried blood she spotted what looked like a grenade. Cursing her cheap, fashionable boots, she skidded through a hard right turn and scooped up the device without slowing. It was cylindrical and heavy, and there was a sloppy bit of electronics stuck on near the fuse.

The stone wall of the courthouse loomed ahead, offering cover from the imminent blast and the chance to catch her breath. She altered course towards it, activated the bomb, and dropped it in the street. It began to emit a loud, incessant beep, distracting Rochelle's bloodthirsty followers; her beleaguered sense of humor saw fit to note that at least they had the collective attention span of a goldfish. While they swarmed around the chirping explosive, she vaulted over the low wall and curled tightly into herself. The pulse grew faster, the roar got louder, she clamped her hands over her ears but her heartbeat was louder than a downpour and she knew she was going to die until finally

_BOOM_.

Echoing silence, red mist, intestines draped over everything like macabre party streamers. Rochelle crouched frozen behind the courthouse, disbelieving the quiet that settled into her bones.

_I just killed them_. The blood trembled in her brain.  _Sweet Jesus, I just killed them. What the hell am I doing here?_ She wasn't breaking a story anymore; the camera, and her entire report, were destroyed. Rochelle couldn't think like a journalist any longer. She just had to escape.

The chopper. The hotel. She had to get to the hotel. Slowly, carefully, she found her feet. The movement required her to take a breath. The breath required her to empty her stomach.

When she became used to the stench and could inhale without gagging, she raised her eyes to the skyline. Thank god, the hotel wasn't all that far away, and she could see two - no, three rotors spinning lazily over the edge of the roof. As she watched, one started going faster than the others, then began to rise.

The big blue "8" on the side of the chopper flashed in the sun. Rochelle's heart stopped, watching her ticket home leave without her. Then it dropped low over the city, and she realized with relief that it was beginning a search pattern of the blocks around the hotel. She reached for her walkie-talkie, to let them know where she was, but cursed when her fingers touched her empty hip. She started to run.

The pilot stayed close to the hotel tower, circling. Rochelle ran as quietly as she could, only pausing briefly to liberate a bottle of water from an unlocked vehicle. The more of Savannah she saw, the more she regretted being ambitious and taking the assignment. Green Flu was obviously more than just a really bad season, they'd known that even before the evacuations started, but this... She could never have been prepared for it. She resolved to stick to the traffic desk from now on.

Rochelle looked up again, searching for her black angel, the bird that would take her away. Its deep  _thokkathokkathokka_  made the air hum, but she couldn't see it.

Not paying attention to her feet nearly killed her.

"Look out!"

A big, bald man in a purple athletic shirt came barreling out of a side street, tackling a rabid plague victim that had been seconds from gouging Rochelle's eyes out. Her savior threw the creature to the ground and brought one heavy foot down, hard. The sickening crack nearly made her vomit again.

"Let's go! C'mon, now!" The older man grabbed her hand and pulled until she followed. She had no breath to thank him.

As they neared the hotel they saw two bright figures sprinting towards them, a baying pack of dark monsters close on their heels. Rochelle and her new friend held the hotel door for two more survivors, and slammed it behind them. A dozen hands started hammering and scratching at it not ten seconds later.

"Well all right, let's git ta them whirlybirds!" declared one of the new pair. He was young, wore a mechanic's coveralls and a blue trucker hat, and for some inexplicable reason seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He grinned widely at them all and made a beeline for the emergency staircase. The other man, dark-haired and dressed in a blindingly white suit spattered with blood, grimaced.

"Helicopters. They are  _called_ helicopters." His accent marked him as a northerner.

The three of them followed the young man to the bleak, squared-off concrete spiral that led to the roof. It was a dishearteningly long climb.

"Who the hell... puts an evac station... up thirty flights a'god-damned stairs?" the man in the purple shirt panted when they were partway up. Rochelle, being younger and quite fit, had no trouble breezing by.

On her way past she heard the fourth survivor tease, "C'mon, coach. Maybe the helicopter… maybe it's made of chocolate."

She stifled a giggle. Purple-Shirt  _was_  a bit heavy, but thirty-something White-Suit wasn't exactly flying, either. She and Trucker-Hat, quite a ways ahead, paused on a landing to wait for the older men. They looked out over the city through the narrow window-slit, breathing a little easier for a moment.

But only a moment.

As Rochelle watched the News-8 helicopter come into view around the building, a cloud of dust and debris was visible on the street. It looked... wrong. Wrong-er than anything she'd seen yet in this godforsaken town. And it was moving.

"Ho-lee  _shit_..." breathed Trucker-Hat.

From the center of the dust Rochelle saw a huge...  _thing_ , a monster, pluck a car off the street and send it flying. It was a forest-green Subaru - she'd remember that detail for the rest of her life.

"Oh god, NO!" She tried to force herself through the glass of the window, as if she could stop the horror outside. "No, no, no, JAKE!"

The chopper couldn't get out of the way; its blades spun into the airborne automobile and twisted like old aluminum foil. Not even a military-grade Sikorsky could stay in flight if something even as small and stupid as a _bird_  got stuck in its rotor; her little news chopper didn't stand a chance. It spiraled out of control and plummeted from the sky. She felt the building shake from the crash, and saw flames begin to consume the surrounding area. The flames became a blaze, and a wave of orange destruction advanced on the hotel.

"Come on. The evac… it's waiting," panted White-Suit on his way past. He hadn't seen the crash, and didn't spare a glance for Rochelle's distress. Trucker-Hat finally grabbed her arm as Purple-Shirt forced himself up the stairs towards them.

"I'm sorry, ma'am, but we gotta move!" The young man resumed his ascent, leaping three steps at a time. Rochelle let shock numb her grief and followed, soon dashing gracefully into the lead. Her face felt stretched over her skull, too tight to allow for any expression. She had to believe that Jake had stayed on the roof, that only the pilot had gone out to look for her. An evil whisper in her heart exposed that belief as the false hope it was.

She burst out the roof access and into bright sun… but no wind. Why was there no wind? She fished desperately for any explanation that contradicted the damning evidence of her eyes: both aircraft were slowly disappearing into the west, putting Savannah astern and leaving four people behind to die. Rochelle's body began to shake. There was a high-pitched buzzing in her ears.

"Hey, where is everybody?" demanded Trucker-Hat, close behind her. He cupped his hand to his mouth and hollered. " _Hellooo!_ Anyone here?" When there was no answer he stared despondently over the city, all the excitement snuffed out of him.

"This isn't happening," Rochelle repeated to herself. It couldn't be. It was a nightmare, she'd wake up any second... "This isn't happening… This isn't happening..."

"Aren't they supposed to be savin' our asses?" demanded Purple-Shirt as he emerged from the stairwell, panting.

White-Suit walked slowly forward, staring after their vanishing rescue, until he folded over with exhaustion. After a moment of bracing himself on his knees, he looked up. His face promised a world of pain for whomever he decided to hold responsible for this. Even short on breath, his sneering voice was flinty, cold, and sent chills through Rochelle's heart.

"Looks like there's been a change of plans."


End file.
